It's been another week and it's time to take a step back and review my progress. I started writing on June 1. My goal was to get to 15,000 words this month. It's an achievable goal but it depends on writing a little bit every day. Missing one day here and there doesn't matter, that's easy to catch up, but when you start missing half a week, multiple times, the compounds.

Ten days ago, I had a about 4,600 words written. Today, I have about 5,000.

What happened? Life.

I write mostly during the week, first thing in the morning. The rest of the day is taken up by work and family. Three out of five days last week (as well as today), I slept through my alarm, eliminating my writing time for those days. That's almost a week of no writing. Monday, I did get writing done but Tuesday, to be honest, I wasn't in the mood. I spent the morning completing a video game I've been meaning to complete for a while (ADR1FT, well worth it if you like to explore what it's like to be stranded on a crippled space station).

Reviewing what still needs to be done, I've come to the conclusion that as far as The Departure Protocol and the Wattys, I think it's safe to say that it's unlikely I'm going to have the story ready by the end of September in the shape I'd like it to be. There's just not going to be enough time to write and edit it properly. I'd rather take it slow than produce a rushed story.

It's time to pivot.

Wait, what? You're giving up on your story?

No, not at all. In fact, I'm going to continue working on The Departure Protocol. That hasn't changed. I'm just not aiming to make it part of the Wattys this year. My work on TDP will continue, just at a slower, more deliberate pace. That also, unfortunately, puts the timing of the first chapters up in the air. I may take a bit longer and wait until after the Wattys to start posting. Ideally, I'll then be able to post regularly based on written chapters at that point.

No more Wattys then?

Wrong. I've always intended to enter a couple of other stories. The Descent was already shortlisted once, in 2018, and since it qualifies, why not enter it again?I'm also entering Intervention, my dystopian sci-fi adventure. I'll be shifting my focus to this one as far as the Wattys goes.

Intervention is actually a completed story already. I started it for NaNoWriMo 2018, but the earthquake here in Alaska on November 30th that year killed those ambitions. It wasn't until 2019 that the story was finally completed.

However, considering most of the story was written during the fast and furious days of that November, there wasn't much editing done. I've already started this progress a couple of months ago but it's been slow going with my focus primarily on TDP. The three months remaining before the Wattys submissions close is the perfect opportunity to tweak the story as much as possible.

So there, that's that. Thoughts? What would you do if you were in my shoes? Press on or change it up?